Outline of a Theory of Practice.
About: This article is published in Contemporary Sociology.The article was published on 1980-03-01. It has received 14683 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Practice theory.
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TL;DR: This paper developed a conceptual framework for understanding how intercultural communication, mediated by cultural artifacts (i.e., Internet communication tools), creates compelling, problematic, and surprising conditions for additional language learning.
Abstract: This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding how intercultural communication, mediated by cultural artifacts (i.e., Internet communication tools), creates compelling, problematic, and surprising conditions for additional language learning. Three case studies of computer-mediated intercultural engagement draw together correlations between discursive orientation, communicative modality, communicative activity, and emergent interpersonal dynamics. These factors contribute to varying qualities and quantities of participation in the intercultural partnerships. Case one, "Clashing Frames of Expectation Differing Cultures-of-Use," suggests that the cultures-of-use of Internet communication tools, their perceived existence and on-going construction as distinctive cultural artifacts, differs interculturally just as communicative genre, pragmatics, and institutional context would be expected to differ interculturally. Case two, "Intercultural Communication as Hyperpersonal Engagement," illustrates pragmatic and linguistic development as an outcome of intercultural relationship building. The final case study, "The Wrong Tool for the Right Job?," describes a recent generational shift in communication tool preference wherein an ostensibly ubiquitous tool, e-mail, is shown to be unsuitable for mediating age peer relationships. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate that Internet communication tools are not neutral media. Rather, individual and collective experience is shown to influence the ways students engage in Internet-mediated communication with consequential outcomes for both the processes and products of language development. For some social classes and in highly privileged geographical regions, we have entered into a period of rapid and efficient global communication practices mediating an array of interpersonal, discursivematerial, and cultural activities. Despite the robust connections between the increasing digitization of everyday communicative practice and issues such as globalization and homogenization, Internet-mediated intercultural educational activities remain demonstrably polymorphous. Reasons for this are many. Educational cultures and objectives vary across nation state boundaries (Belz, 2002) as well as across educational institutions within the US. Moreover, within the same university but across courses or time periods, student populations shift, pedagogical goals are reassessed, and micro-interactional phenomena illustrate their own "accentuality" (Volosinov, 1973), even when the task, as it were, is supposed to remain consistent across participants and time (Coughlan & Duff, 1994). The focus of this article is yet another dimension of human heterogeneity -- the cultural embeddedness of Internet communication tools and the consequences of this embedding for communicative activity. Three case studies will be presented which illustrate some of the possibilities and problems associated with foreign language intercultural interaction mediated by Internet communication tools. I argue that Internet communication tools, like all human artifacts, are cultural tools (for an extension of this argument to the natural environment and the social construction of nature, see Braun & Castree, 1998; Harvey, 1996; Williams, 1980). Specifically, I show that e-mail, instant messenger, and forms of synchronous chat, are deeply affected by the cultures-of-use, or to borrow a biological term -- phenotypic characteristics, evolving from the manner in which these tools mediate everyday communicative practice. To unpack this somewhat, most of the American students in the case studies have extensive Internet experience that catalyzes specific forms (and expectations) of communication. In turn, the resulting
548 citations
TL;DR: A critical review of the work of Giddens and its application in the Information Systems field is presented and it is suggested that there may be significant opportunities for the Information systems field in pursuing structurational research that engages sympathetically, yet critically, with Gidden's work.
Abstract: The work of the contemporary British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and in particular his structuration theory, has been widely cited by Information Systems researchers. This paper presents a critical review of the work of Giddens and its application in the Information Systems field. Following a brief overview of Giddens's work as a whole, some key aspects of structuration theory are described, and their implications for Information Systems research discussed. We then identify 331 Information Systems articles published between 1983 and 2004 that have drawn on Giddens's work and analyze their use of structuration theory. Based on this analysis a number of features of structurational research in the Information Systems field and its relationship to Giddens's ideas are discussed. These findings offer insight on Information Systems researchers' use of social theory in general and suggest that there may be significant opportunities for the Information Systems field in pursuing structurational research that engages sympathetically, yet critically, with Giddens's work.
546 citations
TL;DR: The convergence between geography and philosophy has become increasingly manifest in the past two decades as mentioned in this paper, as if Strabo's celebrated opening claim in his Geographia had finally become true two millennia later: "The science of Geography, which I now propose to investigate, is, I think, quite as much as any other science, a concern of the philosopher" (Strabo I, 3).
Abstract: remarkable convergence between geography and philosophy has become increasingly manifest in the past two decades. It is as if Strabo’s celebrated opening claim in his Geographia had finally become true two millennia later: “The science of Geography, which I now propose to investigate, is, I think, quite as much as any other science, a concern of the philosopher” (Strabo I, 3). What is new (and not in Strabo) is the growing conviction that philosophy is the concern of the geographer as well, or more exactly that philosophy and geography now need each other—and profit from this mutual need. Collaboration between the two fields has been evident ever since concerted attention to place began to emerge just over twenty years ago in, e.g., Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place (1976). Because of their emphasis on the experiential features of place—its “subjective” or “lived” aspects— such works were natural allies of phenomenology, a form of philosophy that attempts to give a direct description of first-person experience. Both geography and phenomenology have come to focus on place as experienced by human beings, in contrast to space, whose abstractness discourages experiential explorations. In the case of geography, a primary task has been to do justice to the indispensability of place in geographic theory and practice. So much is this the case that Robert David Sack (1997, 34, 30), a more recent proponent of the importance of place, can claim unhesitatingly that “[in geography] the truly important factor is place and its relationship to space.” 1
545 citations
TL;DR: A re-framing of notions of relations of stigma, signalling shame, and relations of deviance, signalling blame, is proposed and the positing of a variable and changing dynamic between cultural norms of shame and blame is utilised to explore recent approaches to health stigma reduction programmes.
Abstract: The concept of stigma, denoting relations of shame, has a long ancestry and has from the earliest times been associated with deviations from the 'normal', including, in various times and places, deviations from normative prescriptions of acceptable states of being for self and others. This paper dwells on modern social formations and offers conceptual and theoretical pointers towards a more convincing contemporary sociology of health-related stigma. It starts with an appreciation and critique of Goffman's benchmark sensitisation and traces his influence on the personal tragedy or deviance paradigm dominant in the medical sociology from the 1970s. To allow for the development of an argument, the focus here is on specific types of disorder--principally, epilepsy and HIV--rather than the research literature as a whole. Brief and critical consideration is given to attempts to operationalise or otherwise 'measure' health-related stigma. The advocacy of a rival oppression paradigm by disability theorists from the 1980s, notably through re-workings of the social model of disability, is addressed. It is suggested that we are now in a position to learn and move on from this paradigm 'clash'. A re-framing of notions of relations of stigma, signalling shame, and relations of deviance, signalling blame, is proposed. This framework, and the positing of a variable and changing dynamic between cultural norms of shame and blame--always embedded in social structures of class, command, gender, ethnicity and so on--is utilised to explore recent approaches to health stigma reduction programmes.
544 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a possible and coherent reconstruction of constructivism understood as a reflexive constructivism is proposed, in order to avoid both theoretically eclectic and redundant approaches to constructivism.
Abstract: In order to avoid both theoretically eclectic and redundant approaches to constructivism, this article proposes one possible and coherent reconstruction of constructivism understood as a reflexive ...
535 citations